Living Proof r-7

by John Harvey

  A patchy trail of blood contoured its way across the carpet, leading from the bed into the bathroom; blood had dried in tapering lines down the plastic-coated side of the bath beneath the body and more had collected around the plug hole like a pressed rose.

  "Dragged there, d'you reckon?" Millington asked.

  Resnick's mouth tightened.

  "Possible. Dragged himself, could be."

  Why the bath, then? Not the door? "

  "Might not have known. Just getting away. Disorientated. Then again, maybe it was deliberate. Wanted to wash it off."

  There was a uniformed officer outside the door, another further along the corridor, shepherding curious staff and guests on their way. From the hotel register, it had been established that the occupant of the room was a Peter Farleigh, with an address Resnick recognised as one of those villages in the Wolds, north of Loughborough.

  The clean towels which the maid had been carrying were in a heap near the door where she had dropped them; the maid herself was lying down in one of the vacant rooms, according to the manager, in a right old state.

  "We don't know, of course," Millington said, 'if this is Farleigh or not. Not for a fact. "

  Resnick nodded, stepping back into the main room. Both he and Millington were wearing plastic coats over their street clothes, white cotton gloves on their hands.

  A wallet lay on the table beside the bed, nudged up against the base of the lamp. Cautiously, Resnick fingered it open. Whatever money it might have held was gone. Surprisingly, though, the credit cards seemed to be in place. Behind a kidney donor card was a membership card for a squash club in Melton Mowbray which bore a small, coloured photograph above an address and the name, Peter John Farleigh. The man poised over the bath looked different, in the way that dead people do, but Resnick had no doubt that he was one and the same as the person pictured in the photo.

  Resnick stood where he was, focusing on the bed, the ruck of clothes, darkly stained; under the almost silent hum of the air conditioning, the scent of sweat and blood were unmistakable. He tried to imagine what had happened in that room, tried to magic words, expressions out from the walls. If that address were still correct, then Farleigh lived no more than an hour's drive away, so why opt for the hotel in preference to going home?

  Sex, Resnick thought.

  A lover.

  A liaison, bought and paid for, bought and sold.

  Sometimes this was what it cost.

  The door opened from the corridor and Parkinson, the pathologist, came in: tall, bony, thinning hair, neat in a mossy tweed suit.

  Automatically, he fingered an extra- strong mint from the roll in his side pocket and slid his glasses from their case.

  "Now then, Charlie, what have we got here?"

  Lynn thought, this room always smells of flowers. Roses, though there were none that she could see. She sat in the same chair, wooden arms and a curved back, comfortable, but not so comfortable that you would drift off to sleep. Not even through these long silences. Petra Carey, Dr Petra Carey, sitting near to the window, seemingly relaxed. There was a desk, but the doctor ignored it, except sometimes at the beginning of the session when Lynn arrived, she would be there, finishing writing up her notes, glancing, perhaps, at Lyim's file.

  "Lynn, it's good to see you. How are we today?" Petra Carey, today in a short jacket and loose, long skirt, white blouse with a slight frill, wedding ring wide on her hand. Scrubbed face and careful hair, attentive eyes.

  "What would you like to talk about today?" Lynn supposed she might be five years older than herself.

  Quiet, she could hear the ticking of the clock.

  There were seven wounds in all: four to the chest, one between the ribs to the left-hand side, two low in the stomach, approximately two inches above the line of pubic hair. All but one of the chest wounds were scarcely more than superficial; the deepest seeming the one which had passed between the ribs, close, Resnick guessed, to where the heart had been still beating.

  After the scene-of-the-crime team had finished shooting off several rolls of film and videoing Farleigh's body in situ, it had been removed from the bath and laid on thick, opaque plastic sheeting.

  "What time are we looking at?" Resnick asked.

  Parkinson wiped the thermometer with care and returned it to its case.

  "Ten hours, give or take."

  "Midnight, then?"

  "Round about."

  Resnick grunted. At midnight, he had been leaving Sonny's restaurant, exchanging handshakes and goodbyes with David Tyrell, hoping that the heated words being exchanged between youths outside the pub opposite would not escalate into blows, causing him to intervene.

  "Any chance you'll get to my panel tomorrow?" Cathy Jordan had asked.

  Resnick had replied noncommittally uncertain; now it was clear that he would not.

  He had picked up a cab across the street from Ritzy's and, home, had poured himself a half-inch of bison grass vodka and read a little more of Cathy Jordan's book. So far, the most likely culprits behind April's murder seemed to be a former ex-criminal client of her father, a rejected would-be lover, or -just out of the woodwork April's half-brother by one of her father's previous liaisons.

  Resnick's money was on the brother. In the book, it was easier; in the book it didn't matter if he were wrong.

  "Nothing else for me here now," Parkinson said.

  "You'll be at the post?"

  Resnick nodded.

  In a room along the corridor, Kevin Naylor was patiently questioning Mane-Elisabeth Fourier, having to remind her almost every other sentence to speak in English, not French. Earlier, he had tried a few remembered phrases from his school days and she had looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking another language. Then finally she told him everything she knew.

  Divine had found two of the guests with rooms on the same floor, still lingering over their breakfast in the dining room, but they claimed neither to have seen nor to have heard anything. Names and addresses of the other guests he obtained from the hotel register.

  Computer records showed that Farleigh had stayed at the hotel on three occasions in the past eighteen months, the first time for a single night, the others of which this was the last for two.

  Always a single room, always on his own.

  "Visitors?" Millington asked.

  "You know the kind I mean."

  "We try not to encourage it, but…" The manager shrugged.

  "People do what they do."

  "And Farleigh, you don't know if…"

  "I've no idea."

  "No gossip amongst the staff? No…"

  "You'll have to ask them yourself."

  We will. "

  The first of the night staff to respond to urgent requests that they make themselves available for questioning, was one of the waiters from the restaurant. Yes, he recognised the man's photo and, no, he had eaten alone, but after he had finished his meal he had sat down again with somebody else. The description the waiter gave was backed up by the barman when he arrived some forty minutes later. Late thirties, early forties, dark hair, black dress. On the game? Could be, nowadays it was increasingly difficult to tell.

  Had either of them seen the woman there in the hotel before? No, they didn't think they had. If they were to be shown some photographs?

  Oh, surely, they'd be happy to oblige. Tickled pink. Couldn't let the likes of her be running around free, now, could they? Was it true, as they'd heard, she'd stabbed him fifteen times or was it just the twelve?

  "Sure you're up for this?" Resnick asked.

  Lynn was looking through the car window at alternations of hedgerow, sunlight catching silver along arable fields.

  "I'll be fine," she said.

  At the outskirts of the village, Resnick slowed behind a dozen sheep, a lad no older than fourteen herding them slowly through a farm gate.

  When Resnick glanced across at Lynn, the skin around her eyes was drawn. He knew he shouldn't have asked her to come
with him; knew also that in situations such as this, she was irreplaceable.

  The house was well back from the road, a small Flat parked in the drive.

  "Mrs Farleigh," Resnick said to the middle-aged woman who came to the door.

  "I'm Detective Inspector Resnick and this is Detective Constable Kellogg. I wonder if we might come inside?"

  Twenty-two Sarah Farleigh had gone through all the normal reactions to her husband's death: disbelief, shock, anger, finally tears. Lynn had moved to hold her and the older woman had shrugged her off, stumbling from the kitchen in which they had been talking, through the French windows of the living room into the garden, which was where Resnick found her, squatting in the middle of half an acre of lawn, face in her hands.

  For several minutes he hunched there beside her, while a blackbird noisily disputed their presence from the branch of a nearby apple tree. When the worst of the crying, the kind that scrapes against the chest, tears the back of the throat, had stopped, to be replaced by intermittent, stuttering sobs, Resnick reached for her hand, the one in which a sodden Kleenex was tightly balled, and she clutched at his fingers as if they were all that could prevent her from falling.

  Clung to them until they hurt.

  "Do you know," she said a little later, letting go of Resnick's hand, accepting the handkerchief that he offered her, wiping her face and blowing her nose.

  "Do you know, he would never lift a finger in this garden? Not as much as mow the lawn. These trees, the flower beds, all of the shrubbery down along the south wall, that was all me. My work. I even used of course, he used to get it at a discount, he would do that1 even used the fertiliser the company made, you know, the one where he worked. Whose goods he sold. It could have been anything, you see. Kitchenware, clothing, anything, just as long as it was something he could sell. It didn't matter that… it didn't matter that… it was used to make things grow."

  Resnick was ready; he shifted his weight and caught her as she half-turned, her body, stiff and thickening into middle age, falling across him, his arms supporting her, her brown hair harsh and soft against his neck.

  Over the top of her head, he could see Lynn standing in the doorway, watching; after a while she turned back into the house.

  The telephone rang and then was still.

  Sarah Farleigh straightened and, shakily, got to her feet. "I'm sorry. Thank you. I shall be all right."

  Resnick smiled a wan smile.

  "I shouldn't be surprised if Lynn hasn't made some tea."

  She looked at him.

  "No. I expect she has. It's what women are good at. It's what we do."

  Resnick walked with her, back to the house.

  The scene-of-crime team had lifted seventeen good prints from the hotel bedroom, the bathroom had yielded eight more. Likelihood was that most of the prints would have come from Farleigh, others either from the hotel staff or previous occupants of the room. So much for cleaning. All these people would have to be contacted, checked and eliminated. If everything worked out the way it did in the textbooks, if luck and logic were on their side, any prints unaccounted for would belong to Farieigh's attacker. If that person had a record, well, while not exactly home free, the police would have a suspect, clear in their sights.

  Everyone involved in the inquiry knew things were rarely that simple.

  "Any sign of those photographs? From the hotel?" Resnick was barely into the office, loosening his tie, undoing the top button of his shirt.

  "Promised half-hour back," Millington said, looking up from the computer printout splayed across his desk.

  "Give them a chase."

  "Right. Mark…"

  Boss? "

  "Ten-by-eights from this morning, find out where they are. And while you're about it, check out the arrangements for viewing the scene of crime video."

  "On it now."

  "Good lad."

  Resnick was reading the printout upside down.

  "From the hotel,"

  Millington explained.

  "Three lists. Guests registered for the past two nights, previous occupants of Farleigh's room, going back two months, and all staff on duty in the past forty-eight hours."

  "Any headway?"

  "Kevin's got a couple in now, running through photos with them. Maybe they'll pick out the woman, maybe not. If not, best haul our tame artist in, get a composite."

  "How about the hotel?"

  "We've got three lads out of uniform, questioning the staff as they clock in."

  Resnick picked up the list and let it fall.

  "We'll need more bodies."

  "Too right. I can hear 'em bleating about overtime already."

  Resnick sighed.

  "I'll have a word with the old man. He can lean on the ACC. Budgets should be their problem, not ours. Meantime, we should get the names on this list checked with Intelligence at Central. Never know your luck."

  Millington nodded.

  "Next thing up."

  In his office, Resnick wondered if it weren't time to call down to the front desk, see if someone wasn't nipping across to the deli.

  They were getting tired, Naylor could see that; losing concentration.

  Time and again he was having to stop them, not leading, not wanting false information, but slowing them down, bringing them back. Not wanting their eyes to gloss over another page of photographs without discriminating, letting individual features sink in. Known prostitutes, working the city centre, with a possible preference for hotels.

  "Jesus," the waiter said.

  "How much longer are we going to be?"

  "Not too long now."

  Yes, but how long? "

  Till we're done. "

  "Don't worry," the barman said, winking.

  "I know him. This is how he spends his breaks; feet up in the bogs back of the kitchen, looking at pictures of women. Only difference, these've got more clothes on."

  "Up yours!" the waiter said, cheerily feigning offence.

  "Nota Not today. It's Friday and I'm a good Catholic, remember?"

  "Here," Naylor said, turning the page.

  "Take your time and have a careful look at these."

  Resnick had the scene-of-crime photographs spread across his desk; the gorgonzola and radicchio sandwich he was eating lay on a paper bag in his lap. What held his attention most, aside from the un focusing depth of the dead man's eyes, was the haphazard pattern of stab wounds in the chest, the single blow the first to be struck, or delivered later, after the fury of the first assault? – that had penetrated the ribs and found the heart. Resnick imagined Farleigh struggling from the bed, endeavouring to escape, only to fall across the mattress-end before the blade was driven home again. Was that how it had been? And then the slow crawl towards the bath.?

  Resnick looked again at the pictures of Farleigh's face, the spread of his overweight body. What had he done or said, Resnick wondered, to provoke such an outburst?

  He brought the remaining half-sandwich to his mouth with both hands and chewed thoughtfully. Catching a stray drip of mayonnaise on the back of his hand, he looked around for something to wipe it on, finally resorting to licking it away; the last thing he wanted to do was get splotches all over the photographs.

  "There!" the waiter said.

  "Where?"

  There. "

  The face he was pointing to, finger wavering stubbily above it, was of a woman who was probably in her forties, with dark hair that hung, puppy-dog-like, around her ears and over equally dark eyes. There was no humour in those eyes. For all the world, she looked as if she had been willing the police photographer to shrivel up and yes die.

  Marlene Kinoulton.

  "You're mad." The barman said, shaking his head. "That's never her."

  I say it is. "

  "She's too old, way too old."

  "You didn't see her as well as I did. You were never as close."

  "She was at the bar."

  "How many times? Twice? Once? You think h
ow many times I was over to the table, bending over to serve her…"

  "Gawping down her front."

  "Never mind that. You know what I'm saying. I had a better sight of her than you. And for my money, that's her."

  The barman swivelled away in his chair, gestured towards Naylor.

  "The hair. It's wrong."

  "What d'you mean wrong?" the waiter asked.

  "It didn't look like that at all."

  "So what? Aren't women changing their hair all the time?"

  "But this look it's thicker, bushy. Can you not imagine feeling that? What it'd feel like? Coarse, am I not right? Where that one last night in the bar, her hair was fine, well looked after, finer than this. No, no way, this is never her."

  For several moments there was silence, both men sneaking glances at Naylor and Naylor not wanting to influence either of them unduly.

  The barman finally jumped to his feet.

  "Well, I don't care what you say. I reckon that's her and I'm sticking to it. And now, if there's anything you want me to sign or whatever I'll sign it, because then, I don't mind telling you, I've had quite enough and, if it's all right with you, I'm out of here, so I am, now."

  Kevin Naylor was looking at the photograph. Marlene Kinouhon. The name meant nothing to him. He. would pass it on down the line and, as long as she was still working the city, they would bring her in. He knew that both men were looking at him, waiting for him to say something positive, send them on their way. His back was aching from bending over the albums for so long and he knew he could do with a pint, but it was at least an hour before he would get one, possibly longer. Always, jarring at the edge of his mind, the conversation he had had with Debbie over breakfast, over children, another baby.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "Thanks for all your time. You've been very helpful."

  Twenty-three Frank Carlucci had picked up the first edition of the local paper on his way back from the. municipal pool. Thirty minutes of steady lengths, interrupted only by the arrival of the first batch of school kids of the day. Juice and coffee hadn't been as difficult to find as the last time he was in the country, ten years before, but even so, his request for a ca fee lane had been treated with disbelief and the cappuccino he ordered instead was weak and boasted no more than a quarter-inch of froth. Let me into this market, Frank thought, and I could clean up.